Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (94 page)

November 9
The Northern Alliance, with CIA support, breaks through Taliban positions at Mazar-e-Sharif. Coalition forces take the Afghan capital, Kabul.

November 14
The UN Security Council calls for a “central role” for the UN in establishing a transitional government in Afghanistan.

December 3–17
The battle of Tora Bora leaves an estimated 200 Al Qaeda fighters dead, but Osama bin Laden is nowhere to be found.

December 9
Taliban forces collapse, and the Taliban leaders, along with Al Qaeda leaders, escape into the mountainous area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Hamid Karzai is sworn in as head of an interim power-sharing government.

2002

February
The new Afghan national army begins training with assistance from U.S. forces.

March
Operation Anaconda, the first major ground assault by combined U.S. and Afghan forces, takes place. But U.S. military planners are increasingly focusing on a potential invasion of Iraq.

July
Hamid Karzai, head of the transitional government, escapes an assassination attempt in his hometown, Kandahar.

November
The U.S. Congress passes legislation calling for $2.3 billion in reconstruction funds and an additional $1 billion to expand the NATO-led International Security Force.

2003

February
Afghanistan remains the world’s largest producer of the opium poppy, according to the United Nations.

March
20 The United States begins the invasion of Iraq (see “Milestones in the War in Iraq,” p. 605).

April
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) agrees to take over command of security forces in Afghanistan; it is NATO’s first operational commitment outside Europe in its history, as it was initially formed to defend Western Europe against the Soviet threat.

May
1 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declares an end to “major combat” in Afghanistan. The announcement coincides with President George Bush’s “mission accomplished”—a declaration that fighting in Iraq has come to an end (see “Milestones in the War in Iraq,” p. 605).

2004

January
An assembly agrees on a constitution for Afghanistan.

April
22 Pat Tillman, a former star player for the Arizona Cardinals in the National Football League, who left the pros to join the army, is killed in Afghanistan. The army initially characterizes his death as the result of a firefight with hostile forces, and promotes it as an act of battlefield heroism. However, his death will later be ruled a result of a “friendly-fire” incident in which he was killed by three shots to the head.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

J
ON
K
RAKAUER,
Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman
:

Although it wasn’t Tillman’s intention, when he left the Cardinals to join the Army he was transformed overnight into an icon of post 9/11 patriotism. Seizing the opportunity to capitalize on his celebrity, the Bush Administration endeavored to use his name and image to promote what it had christened the Global War on Terror. Tillman abhorred this role. As soon as he decided to enlist, he stopped talking to the press altogether, although his silence did nothing to squelch America’s fascination with the football star who had traded the bright lights and riches of the NFL for boot camp and a bad haircut. . . . Unencumbered by biographical insight, people felt emboldened to invent all manner of personae for Tillman after his passing.

October 9
Hamid Karzai becomes the first democratically elected leader of Afghanistan.

October 29
Osama bin Laden releases a videotape three weeks after Afghanistan’s election and just a few days before the U.S. presidential election in which George Bush wins reelection.

2005

September
The first Afghan parliamentary and provincial elections in more than three decades are held.

2006

Summer In a resurgence of violence, Taliban forces step up attacks and suicide bombings. NATO troops take over military operations in the south. There is severe fighting in the region as the Taliban presence remains strong.

2007

May
The Taliban’s most senior military commander, Mullah Dadullah, is killed during fighting with U.S. and Afghan forces.

November
Taliban forces kill six Americans, bringing the U.S. death toll in Afghanistan for 2007 to 100, the highest for any year since the beginning of the war.

2008

June
Taliban fighters free 1,200 prisoners, including 400 Taliban prisoners of war, in an assault on a Kandahar jail.

July
A bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul kills more than forty people; days later insurgents kill nine American soldiers in a single attack.

2009

January
When President Bush leaves office, there are approximately 60,000 international troops—roughly half of them from the United States—on the ground in Afghanistan.

February
17 President Obama orders 17,000 additional troops sent to Afghanistan.

November
President Karzai wins another term following a disputed election with widespread claims of election fraud.

December
1 Replicating the strategy that had apparently succeeded in pacifying Iraq’s most violent areas, President Obama announces an “Afghan surge”; another 30,000 American troops would deploy in 2010. Saying that the deployment is not an open-ended commitment, Obama declares that a troop withdrawal would begin in July 2011.

2010

July
26 The U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley A. McChrystal, is relieved of command. He and some of his subordinates had been quoted making disdainful remarks about top Obama administration officials to a reporter from
Rolling Stone
magazine. President Obama names General David Petraeus, the architect of the “Iraq surge” strategy, to replace McChrystal.

July
A six-year archive of classified military documents about the war in Afghanistan is released online by WikiLeaks, an organization dedicated to whistle-blowing and exposing corruption by governments and corporations. The documents, released to major newspapers around the world, show that American forces are struggling against a revived Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and fuel growing skepticism in Congress and among Americans about the war effort.

October
7 On the ninth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, American casualties in the war there had reached 1,321 military fatalities. In addition, 811 members of NATO and other coalition forces had been killed in Afghanistan. As the war entered its tenth year, public support for the war was slipping in both the United States and Western Europe. The Netherlands had withdrawn its troops and the Canadians would follow. President Obama confirmed that his troop withdrawal would still begin in July 2011.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
, from the State of the Union address, January 2002:

Our . . . goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September 11. But we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. . . . States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, aiming to threaten the peace of the world.

This address, given a few months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks took place and the war against Afghanistan began, may go down as Bush’s signature speech. The phrase “axis of evil,” meant to conjure up the image of the Axis in World War II—Germany, Japan, and Italy—was more symbolic than an actual alliance among the countries Bush mentioned. Iraq and Iran were uneasy neighbors who had fought a devastating war against each other a decade earlier. North Korea was an economic shambles. But the Bush administration viewed all three as sources of funding, training, and support for terrorists.

Why was America in Iraq?

Following George W. Bush’s election in 2000, the United States and the United Kingdom continued to bomb Iraqi air defense systems as part of the “no-fly zones” established by the United Nations after the 1991 Gulf War. In that war, Bush’s father, the first President Bush, had led a multinational coalition against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq following its invasion of neighboring Kuwait (see “What was Operation Desert Storm?,” pp. 539–40). Although there were also UN-mandated sanctions against Iraq, these were widely disregarded.

Then, according to National Security Council adviser Richard Clarke, in the wake of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials expressed an immediate interest in attacking Iraq. In a controversial book,
Against All Enemies
, Clarke contended that the Bush administration was obsessed with Saddam Hussein and became distracted from the war in Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Clarke’s account was later corroborated by several high-ranking members of the military and was borne out by a CBS News report. The high-powered obsession of the Bush administration with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was also documented by the filmmaker Charles Ferguson, who recorded in
No End in Sight
, “One day after the September 11 attacks, senior Pentagon officials including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary Douglas Feith spoke to senior military officers about Iraq and the need to remove Saddam. Eighteen months later, they got their wish.”

One year after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush spoke at the United Nations and demanded that Iraq eliminate its weapons of mass destruction (WMD), refrain from supporting terrorism, and end the repression of its people. These three reasons became the ostensible justification for America’s going to war in Iraq—in the first preemptive war in American history—to achieve “regime change,” that is, to eliminate Saddam Hussein as Iraq’s leader. But unlike his father, who had mustered a large coalition of nations in 1991, President Bush decided to go to war despite the objections of most of America’s Western allies. The principal exception was Great Britain, although Spain and Italy also joined in the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

With National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice raising fears of “a mushroom cloud” and by constantly connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks—in spite of substantial evidence to the contrary—the United States went to war, unprovoked, against Iraq in March 2003.

In
Fiasco
(2006), a widely praised, stinging assessment of that war three years after it began, the
Washington Post
’s senior correspondent Thomas E. Ricks wrote, even as the war dragged on:

President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy. The consequences of his choices won’t be clear for decades, but it is already abundantly apparent in mid-2006 that the U.S. government went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information—about weapons of mass destruction and a supposed nexus between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda’s terrorism—and then occupied the country negligently. Thousands of U.S. troops and an untold number of Iraqis have died. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, many of them squandered. Democracy may yet come to Iraq and the region, but so too may civil war or a regional conflagration, which in turn could lead to a spiraling of oil prices and a global economic shock. . . . Spooked by its own false conclusions about the threat, the Bush administration hurried its diplomacy, short-circuited its war planning, and assembled an agonizingly incompetent occupation.

MILESTONES IN THE WAR IN IRAQ

2001

October
The State Department begins planning a post–Saddam Hussein transition in Iraq, including discussions with Iraqi expa-
triates.